


Without You

by rhododendron (rhododendra)



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2012), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 10:17:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4300974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhododendra/pseuds/rhododendron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Decades ago, the world flourished. Humanity blissfully explored within the confines of their own planet; but then they set their eyes to the sky – and accidentally brought an intergalactic war home. Now, Earth is in a state of disrepair, and everyone is doing all they can to fix it. The problem is, different beings have different plans, and the turtles (of course) are going to get caught up in all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without You

**Author's Note:**

> Beta-ed by TMNTpunx on tumblr! 
> 
> Some of the characters have had traits tweaked. Detailed info for the curious can be found on my blog, transdonatello.tumblr.com where I am also archiving this story.

“Abril, I am a grown man; I can walk to work on my own.”

“ _Papá_ , I know. But after seeing that a fourth scientist has gone missing, I can’t help but worry.” Abril O’Neil hugged herself. Around any crumbling corner could lurk a menace ready to snatch her father into the shadows.

Up and down her street buildings, struggled to stand tall. Most were patch-worked at best;  mismatching brick and stone, and for some, duct tape. Cracked concrete sidewalks limited all wheeled vehicles to the street. Small groups of volunteers had fixed what they could, but the city as a whole lacked the funding for repairs. Government focus was too worldwide to have time for local drivel.

“Abril, if someone is out there to get me, it’s going to be worse if you’re there. They could get you, too.”

“Papá…”

“Please, stay home.”

A clunky white van stopped at their doorstep. Out stepped three identical figures.

“Papá! Behind you!”

“Zzzt O’Neil. Target zzt acquired.”

The three  ~~people~~  robots, armed (and brained in the stomach), surrounded the stoop, guns pointed at the balding single father of one.

“Abril! Inside!” He pushed his daughter into the apartment and attempted to pull the door shut behind her, but the bots got to him first.

Abril caught her balance and swung around. Two robots had her father, and the third one was approaching her. She held her fists up, ready to fight. It caught her punch, pinned her arms and tossed her into the van beside Mr. O’Neil.

“Target… zt captured.” It closed the door – on a foot Abril threw at the last second.

She bit back the pain and kicked her other foot, forcing the door open and knocking the Kraang off-balance. The leather of the van seats scrunched under the weight of the two other Kraang turning to stop Abril from leaping to freedom. One grabbed for her, but missed.

Her landing further strained her bruised foot; she closed her eyes and flinched. Mr. O’Neil crawled towards the van exit but the robots held him fast.

“Run!” he yelled to his daughter. “Get help! Don’t look back!”

Abril looked back. She caught the third Kraang coming at her in the corner of her eye, but not the four shadows falling from the sky.

They landed around her, one after the other, causing her to shriek and the Kraang to pause. The one nearest the Kraang stabbed it with what looked like claws.

Another one, with a stick on its back, held a hand out to Abril. “Come with us; we’re here to help you!” it said, it’s voice surprisingly shrill.

Her eyes widened and she backed away from its three-fingered hand. Backed away, and tripped, right back into the van. One Kraang inside pulled her in and shut the door, while the other put its foot to the pedal and the pedal to the floor. The shrewd Donatello, with quick reflexes, threw a shuriken to the door. It beeped and lit. With a screech of the tires, the van took off down the street. The third Kraang’s robot body collapsed, its brain-self dead on a sai.

With disgust, Raphael shook the Kraang off, threw it somewhere into the night. He spit on the ground, enraged by their failure.

“We shouldn’t have stepped in,” he growled. “She was about to get away on her own.”

“She needed help!” Donatello protested. “She was fighting alone!”

“That was not how I imagined a heroic rescue going,” Michelangelo pouted.

“Yeah,” Leonardo eyed the tire tracks. “We disobeyed Sensei, and now for no good reason.”

“We have to find them!” Mike said.

“We will,” said Donatello. “I’m tracking them now.”

His brothers stared on in awe.

Leonardo asked, “How?”

From his belt pocket, Don pulled out a homemade tracker. “I attached GPS chips to all of my shuriken. Sometimes it’s hard to find them again with my bad eyesight.”

“Way to go!” Leonardo said, “Where are they heading?”

“Straightaway down Laird, southbound. Looks like they’re going to the abandoned sector.”

“Wonder what they’re doing there?” Michelangelo said.

“I don’t know, but independent news has reported multiple kidnappings like this now.” Donnie’s voice filled with dread. “Let’s find out.”

*

The abandoned sector of the city housed the remains of a half-century-old war.

When humanity had been eager to explore space, funneling money into spacecraft after spacecraft, they accidentally stuck themselves in the middle of an intergalactic fight. A fugitoid, as he called himself, was on the run from two planetary governments and had been brought aboard the Space Shuttle and later brought to Earth.

The Federation and the Triceraton Republic tore the land to pieces looking for him. Earth was spared only by the benevolence of the Kraang, a brain-in-robot species that revealed themselves to be living amongst humans for thousands of years. They helped humans build a ship in which to send the fugitoid away, and thus, removed all interest the two foreign parties had in Earth.

Humanity responded to the help with either gratitude or distrust. The Kraang took what they could get. They explained that they were stranded on Earth a long time ago when their spaceship crash-landed, and they were simply waiting for the technology to exist to find their way home (which, they explained, was in a galaxy far, far away).

Together, the Kraang and humans did what they could to restore the world, but many areas were deemed desolate and quarantined; colloquially come to be known as ‘abandoned sectors.’ Residents were moved out and refuse was moved in. The Kraang created robots to help tidy up and keep guard at the entrances and exits of these sectors.

Robots which, now, the turtles had to find a way past.

Ninja stealth removed most of the difficulty. Silent as the barren trees, they moved through the long evening shadows, careful of the heat sensors scanning the area. Don led, spotting the sensors with a special pair of goggles he’d designed and motioning which way his brothers should head. They climbed over the crumbling walls and made their way with care.

“Which way, Donnie?” Leonardo asked.

“The signal is resting somewhere over in that direction.” He pointed southwest.

“Resting? So they’re already taken the kid and dad away,” Raphael said.

“Likely, but they can’t have gotten far,” Leo motioned for the others to follow him.

“This is so eerie!” Mike commented, carrying his nunchaku loosely in his hands. “People used to live here. Now it’s a ghost town.”

“More like a mass grave,” Don said, nodding at the rubble and skeletal buildings. “This place was blown to smithereens; people and animals included.”

“Wow, what an uplifting sentiment. Thanks, bro,” Raph said.

“If it was all blown to pieces, why’s that building still there?” Mikey asked, pointing at a shining beacon of a building.

“Looks rebuilt. That’s probably our place,” Leo said.

“It is,” Don indicated the van sitting nearby, unoccupied.

“Weapons ready; we don’t know what we’ll be up against.” Leo pulled out his swords.

They crept to the side of the building, pausing so Don could retrieve his shuriken from the van door.

“They’re probably not expecting outsiders, so we have the element of surprise here,” Leonardo observed. “Don and I are going in to do recon. When we know what we’re up against, and where we need to go we’ll buzz. So keep your phones out.”

“Not a problem!” Mike pulled his out to start a shooter game and leaned against the wall.

Leo stopped Raphael from hitting the phone out of Mike’s hands. Don adjusted his sensor goggles and followed Leo to search for a back entrance.

They cut through a second-floor window and landed in an empty hallway. Leo motioned for his brother to check off to the right, and he would check the left.

Don’s direction heeded another empty hallway, which narrowed the further he travelled, until it dead-ended. Don flipped his goggles through the electromagnetic spectrum to make sure the wall was just a – nope, hologram. He touched his bo staff to it. Unharmed.

He pulled out his phone. “Leo, found something. You? No? Double back, then. I have a false wall.”

Leo joined him shortly. He demonstrated the wall for Leo before they both stepped through it—

—and immediately into a Kraang.

It shrieked, Don shrieked, and the blade in his staff was through it before Leo had time to blink. Don pulled the Kraang out of its robot body (Leo caught the body before it clanged to the ground), held it up high, and squinted at it.

“Gross. I’m almost kind of glad I can’t see these things up close,” he said.

Leonardo was busy surveying the area to make sure the noise didn’t attract anyone else.

“Did you have to kill it? It’s bad enough Raph does that.”

“I panicked!” Don protested, shaking the Kraang off.

“Well, stop panicking then. Ninja know how to keep calm.”

“Ninja who can see what’s two inches from their face know how to keep calm, because they know what’s there.”

“Ninja who don’t ruin their eyesight by spending too much time on the computer know—oh, just hush.” He stepped forward and peered around the nearest corner. “Nothing ahead.”

“Let me double check.” Don scanned the area. “Another false wall at the end of this hall.”

“I’ll go through first this time.”

Don blew him a raspberry.

He stuck his head through the wall and then instantly backtracked.

“Lots of Kraang. We need the others.” He pulled out his phone and texted Raph and Mike where and how to find them. While he and Don waited, he devised a plan.

“Whoa, trippy.” They heard Mike down the hall. Leo facepalmed.

“So what do we got?” Raphael asked, coming into view.

“Holding cells,” Leonardo explained. “A lot of guards. There’s no way to sneak in, so act fast. We find the girl and her father, grab them, get out.”

“What if we find the other prisoners here too?” Don asked, adjusting his grip on his staff.

“We’d have to come back for them. Too many people will slow our group down.” Leo pulled out his swords and readied to step back through.

“What if we took the van though?” Michelangelo asked.

Leo pinched between his eyes. “We don’t have the keys.”

“Couldn’t Donnie figure something out?”

“I suppose I could try to hotwire it…” Don tapped his chin thoughtfully.

“No, we need everyone here to fight.”  Leo waved his swords at the hologram wall. “There’s too many opponents!”

“But if there’s others,” Mike protested, bouncing in place, “we shouldn’t leave them! What if something bad happens to them before we come back? What if they get moved somewhere else?”

“Mike, if we take all of them, there’s a greater risk to them being caught again – a greater risk for us four being caught – both situations which make it worse for them than leaving them behind.”

“Can we just go already?” Raph asked, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Leo nodded. “On my—count..”

Raphael tore through the wall, teeth bared and sai out. The other two at least waited for the signal. Leo waved deadpan for them to move. He followed last, and hanged back for a moment to assess the situation.

Raph went from Kraang to Kraang, knocking them out or killing them, whichever happened first. Leo motioned for Mike to help Raph and for Don to get looking. Don scanned for human bodies and located three, spread across as many cells. The smallest body was in the farthest cell.

“Found them!” he informed Leo, who paved a way for him to reach the cells.

Donnie lifted his goggles and peered in the furthest cell. The girl inside was curled up in the corner, glaring at the ground. Don knocked to get her attention; she jumped. He gave a kind wave and then motioned to the door lock. With Leo guarding his back, he set to picking it.

That proved easier said than done. The girl got up and watched him work from her cell window with interest.

“Donnie, hurry up! There’s more heading this way!” Leo said.

“I’m trying my best!”

Leonardo scanned the room. “Raph, Mike, help! Focus efforts this way!”

Mikey did. Raphael, however, seemed not to hear. Leo wanted to yell after him, but focused instead on blocking the Kraang’s hits.

Then the first gunshot fired. Leo’s shoulders tensed, but he couldn’t see where it came from.

Another shot had Mikey ducking. Behind him, a line of armed Kraang approached. They formed a blockade and took aim.

“Donnie, we need to go now!”

“I’ve almost got it!”

“NOW.” Leonardo grabbed his brother’s arm, but Don shoved him away.

Michelangelo, the clown, made noises and faces to draw the Kraang attention away. With a gymnast’s grace he led every shot askew.

“Mikey, wherever Raph went, follow him!” Leo shouted over the increasing gunfire. “Don, let’s go!”

“Got it!”

The cell door slid open. Leo leapt to the right to avoid a barrage of bullets; Don to the left, into the cell.

“Hello again I’m here to save you come on.” Don spouted to the girl he just nearly landed on, reaching for her. She backed away. “Miss, forgive my rudeness, but we need to go.” He held his hand out. “Please.”

“DONNIE,” Leo ordered, voice distant.

“I’m coming!” He turned to the girl. “Miss, I’m begging you!” He shook his upturned hand at her.

A wall of Kraang lined up at the cell door. Don whipped out his staff and sliced his blade through all of their guns, breaking them or knocking them from the Kraang’s hands. There was a sudden weight on his back which made him stumble forward.

“Go,” he heard the girl’s breathless voice. She wrapped her arms around his neck.

He charged, knocking the robots aside with his bo (except for one, whose upper torso he ripped off to take with). The wall on the other side of the room from him flickered, covering and uncovering a large hole.

“This whole place is just a giant hologram, isn’t it,” Don mused, running towards the hole.

“The cell was pretty darn real,” the girl muttered. She shrieked when they went through the wall.

Don opened his mouth to respond but was yanked sideways by all of his brothers and dragged off the way they initially came. Kraang came pouring out of all entrances to the building, firing bullets, and now also lasers. The turtles ducked and dodged. Don tripped twice when the girl’s grip tightened to the point of choking him.

“Miss, I understand having a firm hold, but please don’t knock me out,” he said.

“My name is Abril,” she whispered, eyes clenched tight.

“Sorry, Abril.” He wrapped one free arm around one of her legs to help her keep a good hold.

“Raph, we need another hole,” Leo said, pointing towards the dividing wall that guarded the sector.

“What do I look like, a bulldozer? I was thrown through that fake one!”

“Do you want me to throw you through this one?”

“No!” He paused. “Mike, get in your shell.”

“I’m running, dude. No can do. Aaah!”

Raphael tackled his brother from behind and rolled them over once. Mike retreated into his shell to avoid losing his head. Raph picked up his shell in the process, and continued on.

He plowed through the wall, using Mike’s shell as a shield (“OW!”).

Once through, Leo looked back to see Kraang gathering at the hole and threatening with their guns. If they wanted to keep their peace and quiet, they couldn’t keep up the chase. The price of secrecy.

The turtles paused at the edge of the living sector to catch their breath. Mikey winced a little as he rubbed his back. Donnie let Abril down, then caught her when her bad foot wouldn’t hold her weight.

“You’re safe now,” he told her. “If you want to go, we won’t stop you.”

“We won’t?” Raph asked.

“No, we won’t.” Leo affirmed. “We freed her; we completed our mission.”

“Wasn’t our mission to save her dad, too?” Michelangelo mumbled.

“And there was another person there as well,” Don added, fiddling with the head of the bot in his hands. Abril held onto his shoulder for balance.

“Doctor Rockwell,” Abril said softly. “And my dad… will you guys go back for them?”

“As soon as we can,” Leo promised. “Also, Don, did you seriously take a Kraangbot with you.”

“I want to study it-ow!”

Raph smacked him over the head. “You klepto.”  

Don only glared in response.

“I should thank you.” Abril patted Don’s shoulder. “Whoever you guys are, or whatever you are. Thank you for rescuing me.”

The turtles properly introduced themselves.

She nodded. “It is good to meet all of you.” She looked off at the living sector. “I guess I should be getting… home.”

“Do you want us to accompany you?” Don offered. “That foot might give you a hard time.”

“I guess that would be for the better.”

Don was already leading her away before she finished speaking. “I’ll see you guys back at the lair,” he told his brothers, tossing the robot piece at Leo. “Put this in my lab please!”

When he was out of earshot, Leo muttered, “With all the other shit that’s already there?”

*

Don hopped the turnstiles leading into his home, finding his family waiting on the couch for him. Splinter stood upon catching sight of Don and closed the distance between them.

“Welcome home, my son.” He reached a hand out. Don leaned in, expecting a hug, but instead received a loud smack across the face. “You foolish boy.” He turned to the others. “All of you were foolish to go after the Kraang. You are very lucky to be alive.”

“Hai, sensei,” said the other three. Don only rubbed his sore cheek.

“I allowed you to start going to the surface six months ago so that you could explore and expand your skills, not run off on reckless rescue missions.”

“Sorry, sensei,” Don said to the floor.

Splinter sighed. “I am just relieved that you are all safe.” This time he reached out to pull Don into a hug. “However, you are all grounded until further notice.”

“Hai, sensei.”

*

Don sat down on his bed, and began to browse through his phone contacts. At the top of the alphabetical list was now Abril. He couldn’t help the smile that crossed his face.

**

“Karai.”

 _‘It’s Kai.’_  “Yes, father?”

“We will be leaving for New York shortly. I hope your things are packed.”

“They are, father.”

“Good girl. Make sure they are left by the front door so the driver can load them in the car.”

 _‘I’m not a girl.’_  “I will do so.”


End file.
